Call of Duty: Modern Warfare didn’t have the smoothest of rollouts this past month. The game has been in a pretty buggy state since launching, and despite patches, problems remain. Users are still buying the game like gangbusters though, as it continues to be a huge launch for Infinity Ward and Activision.
The popular franchise has been losing steam for a while, at least for some. While the games continued to sell well, the overall offerings appealed to less and less gamers overall because some felt they were just more of the same multiplayer shooter. The trend of waning popularity certainly got dealt a major blow with the explosion of Apex Legends and similar titles in recent months. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has had to fight for every inch of ground against this trend, and the fans are not happy even now. The marketing for the game turned up the emphasis on realism and violence, a focus that has caused some controversy in the past for the franchise. But the final product also made several faux pas’ by changing important historical events, and then offering a bad apology for any insult caused.
The game launched to amazing sales though, as the marketing helped bring back some of those who had moved on to other titles. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare topped $600 million in sales in its first three days of release, Activision said shortly after launch. But the amazing sales boom hasn’t stopped people from noticing some problems. As an endless string of casual gamers and online personalities pointed out, the FPS is riddled with bugs. Call of Duty YouTuber and Twitch streamer named TheXclusiveAce brought some of these issues to wider attention, find their video below.
The bugs being reported vary wildly, but some of them are absolutely devastating in terms of how they affect the game. Bugs and glitches are nothing new in video games, but these are very bad indeed.
“Peekers advantage” in particular is one of the more egregious ones being seen by many, and it’s clearly a broken version of the viewport the game uses. The concept of a viewport goes like this, the game engine only renders objects from certain directions. This is usually a performance optimization that works alongside draw distance and other restrictions to reduce the load of rendering a scene on a system. One common instance of this is to not render the item directly behind the gun the player has out and equipped, saving on some elements of a scene being drawn and detailed. But for some reason, the version of the tech this title uses is completely broken, leading to issues with enemies popping up out of nowhere or being able to sneak past a player that should be able to see them.
Another rather terrible bug in an online shooter is an issue that quite literally destroys the point of the multiplayer, the main draw for many. Hitboxes in games are a pretty basic and core concept. The models rendered in game have to be able to interact with other models and objects in the scene, and the code that creates hitboxes and handles how they interact is vital to that. But for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it would appear that there are serious miscalculations applied to the sizes of some models and their hitboxes, leading to incredibly unfair gameplay.
